Following their »Schubertliedern« (col legno WWE 20301), the Musicbanda Franui have now taken up Johannes Brahms’ German Folk Songs, published by the composer as an old man in 1893/94: songs telling tales of affection and farewell, of love-madness, loss and immeasurable grief. A collection both beautiful and eerie, dedicated to a collective experiencing of grand emotions.

Thus, an ideal starting point for the Musicbanda – well-versed in funeral marches and dance tunes – to study Brahms’ songbook against the light, and take the music further, always aware that quite a few “folk songs” have been freely invented as such by now almost forgotten composers and lyric writers. Anton Wilhelm Florentin von Zuccalmaglio, for instance, whose collection of songs was Brahms’ main source when he arranged his 49 German Folk Songs WoO 33, was denounced as a “forger” who deliberately duped his contemporaries by presenting them with folk songs of his own creation.

The dispute among scholars as to which folk songs are genuine or not, and which are worthy of being added to the canon of “time-transcending artistic merits”, is, albeit interesting, as irrelevant today as it was at a hundred years ago.

In the German-speaking countries, the year 1945 marked an abrupt end of the century-old tradition of using folk songs as raw material for creating new compositions. No-one wanted to be associated with those who had instrumentalized even folk music for their crimes. Now, six decades later, it may at long last be permissible to lay bare this music and liberate it from interpre-tations and connotations both musical and political, to take up the melodies, get inside them and transform them from within.

In Franui’s adaptation, the folk song heritage is subjected to a constant transformation and joined together in ever new combinations. Verses whole and half, melodies and lines of text find each other in the midst of a well-ordered chaos. Some of the pieces, though, simply refuse to be changed.

These Brahms Folk Songs were first performed as a staged concert at the 2008 Bregenz Festival. The title of the show, “Nur ein Gesicht” – “Only one face”, is the abridged version of a line out of one of the songs – Nur ein Gesicht auf Erden lebt – and, like Franui’s music, possesses a delightful ambiguity: One’s face is something to be saved under any circumstances. On the face of it, though, it may be no more than a mere aspect, an image, a reflection. Yet only one.

Franui is the name of a mountain pasture in the small Austrian (East Tyrol) village of Innervillgraten (1402m above sea level), where most of the musicians grew up. The word Franui is of Rhaeto-Romanic origin and refers to the proximity of Innervillgraten to the Ladin-speaking region in the Dolomite Alps. The highlights of the Musicbanda’s work − they have been going since 1993 − were the song-play “Steine und Herzen” (Stones and Hearts), which premiered at the 2005 Ruhrtriennale in Duisburg’s Kraftzentrale (libretto and direction: Sven-Eric Bechtolf), and also the music and image theater project “wo du nicht bist” (where you are not) (premiered at the 2006 Bregenz Festival, in collaboration with the Berlin theater group “Nico and the Navigators”), for which Franui embarked on a new interpretation of “Schubertlieder”. The CD of the same title was presented at the Burgtheater in Vienna and won the “Ö1 Pasticcio Award”.